It’s weird, if I wasn’t on these forums I’d barely have even heard of it over here and no one else I’ve mentioned it to has seen it either. I’m guessing they’re marketing to people who currently have a netfix account rather than outside of it, or maybe they’re just promoting it more in the US.
Anyway, their copyright is stated very clearly on their site, and it’s very well known to most people in this area that chooseco can be very protective about it https://www.cyoa.com/pages/rights .
I can’t help but think the infringement was deliberate by nextflix, maybe they thought the news coverage was worth it, or they could get a cheaper settlement cf licencing (or perhaps they had an off the table agreement to get news coverage to benefit them both and then settle for an agreed amount if I’m being cynical.) Although it’s annoying for the rest of us, in the end if they’ve copyrighted the phrase, Netflix is in the wrong legally. It’s pretty common for companies to react badly if they feel their brand recognition has been compromised.
When I self-published my first physical/app gamebook Westward Dystopia, I agonized over this exact issue. I ended up using the tagline “Choose Your Own Path!” and seeded the description and keywords with the word “adventure.” That was the best idea I could come up with to skirt the issue.
It is possible, i had mention before
, i never heard of CYOA until i join this forum…
When i explain to friends about HG/CoG i never used the term CYOA , i emphasis on HG/GoG is sort of Game Books , where our choice matter to determine the outcome of an event , and we also have choices in interacting with characters of the story…
If i tell them choose your own adventure , they might be more confuse … because it sound like i tell them to go vacation on certain country
I’ve always used the term “Choose your own adventure” when talking about this website and COG games, WIPs and Demos with my friends. Seems like I was wrong So basically if we avoid this term we’re gonna be fine, right?
Exactly, same you don’t say you make woopers in your own dinner bar or a tailor doesn’t make Levis make denim trousers.
They have all right to protect their rights same Cog has to defend their code and license.
People uses license terms very loosely and provoke misunderstandings that harm consumers. If you are making something Dont compare it with choose your own adventure.
Empathise the fact there are stats and time real changes the customization etc. You aren’t simply choosing a path in a adventure_ You are creating your own adventure character.
I mean that I would do if trying to sell a game of mine and with that Cog. Compare with a older restrictive system that is copyrighted is very naive
(Oh, was that your book? I saw a positive review of it online lately, nice job!)
You’re right in how you say that it’s tricky to give an alternative term, especially if your story is narrative driven as a CYOA happens to be. People writing something akin to Fighting Fantasy can probably use the Gamebook term, as I likely would, and I would use that term with COG titles as well (even though most titles are far more text driven than a classic Fighting Fantasy book would be).
Interactive Fiction is the term I would use for all types of the genre before I then divide between pure narrative (Choose Your Own Adventure) and stat based, possibly involving dice and combat (Fighting Fantasy). I like to assume ALL Interactive Fiction (be it in a book, a mobile app, a movie or a video game) comes somewhere between those two core groups, outside the testy area of Reader Interactives (which I have already told my distain for in how people confuse it with CYOA style fiction).
To those who haven’t heard of Choose Your Own Adventure books before, that’s kind of understandable to some point. The last classic CYOA book Mayday! was released in 1998, over twenty years ago now. Some children of the 90’s and early 00’s like me might associate CYOA style fiction more with the Give Yourself Goosebumps Series, since that was the range back then, alongside the odd spinoff like the Animorphs getting a couple interactive books… but those were essentially the same thing for kids of the 90’s as Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy had been in the 80’s…
Some of this discussion has talked about a “copyright” on Choose Your Own Adventure. What’s at issue is actually a trademark. It’s an important difference - copyright and trademark provide different types of protection to intellectual property.
Here’s the actual Chooseco v. Netflix complaint. Even if I were a lawyer, I wouldn’t predict how this will play out - court decisions involving intellectual property infringements are often a complex balance of different tests. But in general, a fictional work can mention trademarked phrases without being infringing, and the courts won’t necessarily treat a fictional character describing a fictional book as “a Choose Your Own Adventure” in the same way as they would a competing company describing their product as “a Choose Your Own Adventure”.
The complaint says that Netflix said in the movie that bandersnatch was a choose your own adventure book, and it was used in a movie that chooseco feels has damaged their family friendly branding. Pretty sure they’d have a valid complaint tbh, particularly since Netflix applied to use their branding but didn’t get the licence to do so.
There’s been cases in the past where brands have complained and movies have had to remove the references if they didn’t want to be sued over it. It’d be like if you made a movie with a fictional aeroplane that was made by Boeing where said aeroplanes were falling out of the sky. Even through the aeroplane type might not exist, the brand does and they can take exception to the way they’ve been portrayed. A real life example of it happening was where a lawsuit was filed against Heroes for showing the name of the garbage disposal unit that almost cut off one of the characters fingers https://www.howtogeek.com/243047/why-do-tv-shows-and-movies-cover-up-logos/
It’s a movie. Of course choices aren’t going to be as meaningful as CoG games. The movie would be taking a risk if they added a lot of paths in hoping that the viewer would explore other paths after watching it. This movie concept is relatively unique and it would be very unwise to put more money and production time into very deep branching paths.
That is same tactics used in videogames and terrible bad shows all over the world. Why should I care for instance introduce Lgbt characters and alienating part of my audience if i could use generic alpha white harem hoard protagonist? What should I risk and care about storytelling if four action scenes will give me budget.
It is the struggle between Innovation and art Vs GRABBING ALL MONEY AND RUN. Grabbing all money is short term, Innovation and improvement always end being worth.
This would never become a trend if there is no real paths and consequences. People just will stop watching or playing.
To be fair the whole point of Bandersnatch is that choice doesn’t matter as far as the universe and story is concerned. Collin who is the only one fully aware that he is essentially fictional and thus safe from such choices says as much… if he or Stefan dies or kills it doesn’t matter because there’s always going to be a Universe where they didn’t. The viewer is as much a prisoner as Stefan because they only have a limit of two choices for him, many of which the universe of Bandersnatch considers as wrong.
And both of the film’s ‘best endings’ reflect that, either in the Complete Ending where Stefan only creates a perfect game by killing his father and having no ‘distractions’ via removing any real consequences from the players choices and having the illusion of choice - just like the movie - or the Train Ending where Stefan time travels back to his mother, ultimately realising the only way to be happy is to die with her and essentially give his younger self a happy life, thereby ensuring one possible outcome is essentially the ‘best’ one, even if the full ending suggests it’s not essentially true.
Not exactly what I was expecting as a follow up for Netflix’s interactive content, but I could see this being fun, especially since it’s a whole series of it. I assume there’s not going to be that much interactivity beyond ‘do I do this bad thing or this good thing which advances stuff’ though.
They did confirm a little while back that Netflix are planning to have more interactive films over numerous genres. Hopefully not just horror and romance stuff.
I know I’m extremely late to this party, but I just watched Bandersnatch, and I hated it. Not because I have anything against what it was trying to do - I don’t particularly have a problem with the explore-all-the-paths gameplay of Virtue’s Last Reward, or binary meaningless flavor decisions like in Persona 5, or short bad ends like in classic choose-your-own-adventures - but because the actual content was terrible. Those characters! That “I think the player is controlling us” theme! The senseless violence you can stumble into doing whether you want to or not! Waking up because it was all just a dream! The platform might have promise - I mean, I like timed conversation options as much as the next Witcher 3 player - but Bandersnatch is sophomoric.
Just tried the first two episodes of You vs Wild, it’s actually really fun! It seems like you get two different initial core paths in each episode you can take and then all other choices are either good or bad, though Bear is smart enough not to let you accidentally kill him as I found in one choice! The first episode also has an initial equipment pick choice which seems to reflect on your options in the episode, which I thought was good!
There are eight episodes with two per biome - there’s a different story or mission in each episode. Worth trying if you like nature and survival shows.
Following along the last posts on this thread, Philip DeFranco yesterday summed up another look into the interactive media trend that inspired Bandersnatch and how this content is continuing to evolve and impact the field of cinema. I thought it had some interesting insights.
So basically if we avoid this term we’re gonna be fine, right?